R&D: CERNBox, Cloud Storage Hub From CERN

EDP Sciences has published, in EPJ Web of Conferences (Volume 214, 2019, 23^rd International Conference on Computing in High Energy and Nuclear Physics (CHEP 2018), an article written by Hugo González Labrador, Georgios Alexandropoulos, Enrico Bocchi, Diogo Castro, Belinda Chan, Cristian Contescu, Massimo Lamanna, Giuseppe Lo Presti, Luca Mascetti, Jakub Moscicki, Paul Musset, Edward Karavakis, Remy Pelletier and Roberto Valverde, CERN, 1 Esplanade des Particules, Meyrin, Switzerland.

Abstract: “CERNBox is the CERN cloud storage hub. It allows synchronizing and sharing files on all major desktop and mobile platforms (Linux, Windows, MacOSX, Android, iOS) aiming to provide universal access and offline availability to any data stored in the CERN EOS infrastructure. With more than 16000 users registered in the system, CERNBox has responded to the high demand in our diverse community to an easily and accessible cloud storage solution that also provides integration with other CERN services for big science: visualization tools, interactive data analysis and real-time collaborative editing. Collaborative authoring of documents is now becoming standard practice with public cloud services, and within CERNBox we are looking into several options: from the collaborative editing of shared office documents with different solutions (Microsoft, OnlyOffice, Collabora) to integrating mark-down as well as LaTeX editors, to exploring the evolution of Jupyter Notebooks towards collaborative editing, where the latter leverages on the existing SWAN Physics analysis service. We report on our experience managing this technology and applicable use-cases, also in a broader scientific and research context and its future evolution with highlights on the current development status and future road map. In particular we will highlight the future move to an architecture based on micro services to easily adapt and evolve the service to the technology and usage evolution, notably to unify CERN home directory services.“

© The Authors, published by EDP Sciences, 2019
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